The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky

Contents

1. Publisher’s Introduction (1920) 3 min 2

   The Detroit publisher’s introduction to the 1920 American reprint presents the book to American workers as a handbook of working-class tactics. It hails the Russian workers’ revolution, condemns the “pseudo Marxism” of Kautsky and his American counterparts, and quotes two passages: one on the treachery of confining the proletariat to bourgeois democracy, one on why the exploiters cannot be expropriated at one blow.

2. Preface 7 min 6

   Lenin introduces his reply to Kautsky’s Vienna pamphlet on the dictatorship of the proletariat as an exposure of the Second International’s bankruptcy. To show that his charge of apostasy predates the Bolsheviks’ seizure of power, he recalls his earlier criticisms: in Socialism and War (1915), which called Kautsky’s Marxism “Struveism” reconciled with defence of the fatherland; in Imperialism, against Kautsky’s definition of imperialism; and in The State and Revolution, whose chapter on the opportunists already identified Kautsky’s distortion of Marx’s theory of the state.

3. I How Kautsky Turned Marx into a Hackneyed Liberal 28 min 10

   Lenin attacks Kautsky’s contrast between “democratic” and “dictatorial” methods. Kautsky called the dictatorship of the proletariat a single word of Marx’s, meaning a condition of majority rule rather than a form of government. Lenin replies that democracy is always democracy for a class, and defines dictatorship as power resting directly on force and unbound by law. He argues that Marx’s exception for England and America had lapsed with imperialism, that the Commune was no “pure democracy”, and quotes Engels on revolution as the most authoritarian thing there is.

4. II Bourgeois and Proletarian Democracy 21 min 8

   Lenin argues that there is no “pure democracy” while classes exist: bourgeois democracy, though an advance on feudalism, is a paradise for the rich and a trap for the poor. He cites Marx and Engels on the state as a machine of class rule, lists examples of repression in democratic republics, and attacks Kautsky’s praise of minority rights. Against this he sets the Soviet regime, which gives workers presses and buildings, publishes secret treaties and draws the masses into administration, and which he calls a million times more democratic than any bourgeois republic.

5. III Can There Be Equality between the Exploiters and the Exploited? 18 min 3

   Lenin argues that exploiters and exploited cannot be equal. Kautsky held that a regime backed by the majority need use force only to defend democracy. Lenin replies that the overthrown exploiters keep money, education, connections and military skill, and resist desperately in the hope of restoration, drawing the wavering petty bourgeoisie behind them, so the proletariat must suppress them by force. He concedes that disfranchising the bourgeoisie is a specifically Russian measure, not a necessary part of the dictatorship.

6. IV The Soviets Must Not Become State Organizations 16 min 5

   Kautsky praised the soviets as fighting organisations of the whole working class but denied that they should become organs of state. Lenin calls this a copy of Martov’s Menshevik position and notes that the Bolsheviks had demanded a Soviet state, and a change of name, since April 1917. If the state is a machine of class oppression, a class that wins the final battles against capital must make its own organisation the state; to say otherwise is to preach class collaboration and fear of victory.

7. V The Constituent Assembly and the Soviet Republic 21 min 6

   Lenin answers Kautsky on the dispersal of the Constituent Assembly. Kautsky had quoted his theses selectively and implied that the Bolsheviks discovered the superiority of soviets only after losing the election. Lenin cites his April 1917 statements, insists that the revolution’s interests stand above the Assembly’s formal rights, and traces the conflict between the soviets and bourgeois institutions through 1917. A table of the All-Russian Congresses of Soviets shows the Bolshevik share rising from 13 to 66 per cent.

8. VI The Soviet Constitution 23 min 10

   Lenin defends the Soviet constitution against Kautsky’s charges of arbitrariness. He argues that disfranchising the bourgeoisie arose from the struggle, after the Kornilov affair and the bourgeoisie’s boycott of the soviets, and that civil war against Czechoslovak and Cossack revolts cannot be treated as parliamentary opposition. He defends the expulsion of the Mensheviks and SRs from the soviets and mocks Kautsky’s small master with one journeyman as Eugen Richter’s “thrifty Agnes” revived. Revolutionary Marxists, he says, always promised to suppress the exploiters.

9. VII What Is Internationalism? 35 min 8

   Lenin contrasts Kautsky’s internationalism with his own. Kautsky approved the Mensheviks’ policy of keeping the army fighting until all powers accepted peace without annexations; Lenin calls this defence of the fatherland in an imperialist war and a betrayal of socialism. Kautsky argued that the Bolsheviks had staked everything on a European revolution; Lenin replies that they counted on it but not by a fixed date, that all Marxists had expected war to bring revolution, and that Bolshevism had laid the foundations of a Third International.

10. VIII Subserviency to the Bourgeoisie in the Guise of Economic Analysis 1 h 5 min 16

    Lenin rejects Kautsky’s “economic analysis” of Russia as Menshevik theory warmed over. He restates the Bolshevik two-stage scheme: a bourgeois revolution with the whole peasantry, then a socialist revolution with the village poor, which he dates to the committees of the poor in summer and autumn 1918. He accuses Kautsky of misquoting the land decrees, defends land nationalisation and equal tenure as the most radical bourgeois measures, and denies that factories were handed to workers. He breaks off on hearing of the German revolution.

11. App. I Theses in Respect of the Constituent Assembly 11 min 3

    Lenin’s nineteen theses on the Constituent Assembly, published in Pravda in January 1918. They grant that the Assembly is the highest form of bourgeois democracy but hold a soviet republic higher. The Assembly’s composition, elected from lists drawn up before the October Revolution and before the SRs split, no longer reflects the people’s will. The theses demand that the Assembly accept Soviet power, failing which the conflict will be settled by revolutionary means.

12. App. II Vandervelde’s New Book on the State 17 min 4

    Lenin compares Kautsky with Émile Vandervelde, whose Socialism versus the State (1918) he read after finishing the pamphlet. Both, he says, quote Marx and Engels while omitting the destruction of the bourgeois state machine and the suppression of the exploiters. He criticises Vandervelde’s eclectic distinction between the state as an organ of authority and as an organ of administration, and his “popular labour state”, as a petty-bourgeois replacement of revolution with “stages of transition”.